To Kill A Marauder
by darken-the-legends
Summary: Wormtail is a traitor. The Marauders are dead. So is Fred Weasley. Maybe… maybe this could all just work out fine. JPLE, RLNT, bromances all round and possibly a tiny bit of JPSB as well... if you squint.
**Heya! Unlike the characters in this, I am back from the dead. Although I may have seen them as I left…**

 **Not really part of Intrinsic, but it's another oneshot, not really MWPP era, but about the Marauders in any case… plus Fred, because, well, Fred.**

 **JKR owns this, because my cunningly non-existent plan to Obliviate everyone and steal the copyright failed.**

 **Part One: Shattered Unity**

Despite popular belief, James isn't stupid.

No, really. He isn't.

He's known there's been a spy for months; he's aware that Sirius and Remus suspect each other, and he's equally aware that they are both mistaken – that they must be, because he trusts his friends and despite their failings they are utterly loyal and neither would betray him.

Still, he doesn't know whom it actually is, and unfortunately it seems he never will, because by some stupid coincidence he left his wand upstairs and Voldemort has no qualms about murdering the unarmed and innocent… he's proved that before.

Well, James is an Auror. He may be unarmed, but he is _certainly_ not innocent by any reasonable definition of the word, even if the Ministry don't really care. But, then, now he isn't an Auror, because… well, apparently he's dead. And he knows this will tear his friends apart… which was the last thing he ever wanted.

So he and Lily are stuck here, bound to remain by ancient laws, because the options are this or being ghosts and he swore that would never happen.

 _So,_ he has no way of knowing what has happened to his son – hopefully, Sirius has him – or his friends. And that's probably the worst part of this whole mess… that they'll have to wage war against Voldemort without him, although to be honest he prefers Lily safe here, if you can call being dead safe.

"James?"

She sits down beside him, her fiery hair as resplendent not as it was in life, but the colour he once loved seems to instead mock him with a vengeance – a painful reminder of all he had and now has irretrievably lost, both through his own stupidity and through the inevitable course of fate and destiny combined. And her eyes…

James hopes their son will know he has his mother's eyes.

"There was nothing you could have done," she says eventually, as he knew she would, and it isn't enough, as he knew it wouldn't be.

But maybe, in time, in some impossible future, it can be something.

 **Part Two: Old Habits**

For a Black – well, a disgraced one at that – the afterlife is disproportionately and unsettlingly white.

That 's the first thing he notices, the second being that _Bellatrix killed him,_ and _Harry is on his own and possibly dying right now,_ but – Sirius finds a cruel irony in this fact – if his godson _does_ die Sirius is probably likely to find out sooner or later, now, isn't he?

Ow.

This last is brought to his wavering attention as his hands move automatically to his chest as if to stall bleeding. The precise point where Bellatrix's spell struck him burns, aching with a fiery and poignant intensity that feels suspiciously like she meant, if not to kill him, to cause him severe pain for a long while.

Years of Azkaban, however, have made him unusually adept at dealing with physical and mental agony. Pushing both aside, he struggles to brace his arm against the ground to rise.

It doesn't appear to be Heaven – or, at least any version of it that Sirius has ever heard of, but it's also conspicuously _not_ Hell. In fact, the only detail he can really describe is the overwhelming light that radiated from every possible area… also, the fact the ground appears to be solid, and considering some of the situations Sirius has been in over the years, that's actually not an unreasonable thing to note.

But he digresses.

Honed combat reflexes are testament to the fact that seconds before the other being will reach him, Sirius ducks, spins and sends his fist hurtling across with lightning speed to meet with the body of his would-be attacker.

It never meets, as seconds later his forearm is gripped in someone else's unrelenting steel fingers.

"Padfoot?" a voice chokes. A man's voice, low and shocked, although Sirius still hasn't looked up – maybe he's afraid to, because that voice – that tone, belongs to a person whom Sirius knew so long ago that he can't look back on those memories without getting a kind of alternate-universe-witnessed-several-hundred-years-ago-in-someone-else's-Pensieve feeling.

Also, the owner of that voice is… dead.

Like him.

"No, no, this wasn't meant to happen…" the same voice murmurs.

He's so, so afraid to look at their face, but he has to.

And he does.

"James?"

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

His friend – well, that's not the right word, but 'brother' isn't it, either, and Sirius doesn't know beyond that – forces him to tell him what's gone on; his eyes burn as Sirius tells him about Peter as surely as the wound does in Sirius's chest; it's strange he hasn't destroyed something by the time Sirius gets to his long sojourn in Azkaban, and he's barely distracted by the news of Harry.

" _Bellatrix_ killed you?" he keeps saying in disbelief. "But… the two of you…"

"Yeah," Sirius forces a smile. "Hey, James, how old do I look right now?"

"Like when I last saw you," James blinks. "Time is difficult to judge here, but from listening to you… it's 1995?"

" '96," Sirius answers briefly.

"I hadn't thought of that," James frowns.

"You never think of anything," Sirius mutters, and suddenly he realises that James is looking at him weirdly, and remembers that even if he looks twenty one again, this bitter, serious cynic is so not the same as the man James knew once.

"You've changed," James murmurs, and all Sirius wants to do is collapse onto the ground and sleep and let James guard him, someone _other_ than Sirius alert for once like it used to be with them.

But he knows that wouldn't be fair to James.

So he doesn't.

"Padfoot," says James reproachfully. "Stop pretending you're okay. Right. Now."

"I'm fine," he complains, although it's probably the most obvious lie he's ever told.

"Firstly, you just died, so, you're not. Secondly, both Lily and your brother are here, and if you don't shut up then I am not waiting until tomorrow, I am getting them _now._ "

"You're evil," he mock-pouts, and the familiar routine feels so good that what can the harm be with relaxing into it for a little while?

"Yeah, I am. Relax. I want to restart the Marauders, which we can't do while half the group looks like their corpse, and besides you can kill me for this when you're better."

"It will be painful," Sirius promises.

James just laughs and gathers Padfoot into his arms and stays there until morning.

(Which, in the afterlife, may as well be forever.)

 **Part Three: The Pack Concept**

Wolves are dogs, and dogs have pack, but through Remus's stupidity he has lost his own.

First, he realises now, was Peter, weak-willed Peter who was twisted and succumbed to the dark side. He would like to make a hero of his old friend, but this is Voldemort, and Voldemort has left no heroes.

Only victims, and survivors.

Is this what has become of the Marauders?

All victims, in fact, and not survivors.

He watched them all waste away after Lily and Prongs died; not on the outside, because Sirius was imprisoned and Peter was in hiding, but more their friendship – that corroded being of beauty which was spoiled and rotten at the core from the moment Peter defected.

Remus doesn't know if the Dark Mark is seared onto the rat's arm, and at the same time he doesn't really care, because he won't think of these things now. He'll think of Tonks, and how their mortal hands never quite touched until they were dead. She's here now, beside him, and that may as well be the only permanent thing in this idiotically contrived pile of dragon dung.

"Remus," she whispers, "Remus. We're dead, right?"

He would roll his eyes if it were any other, but he knows she's getting at something. "Yes."

"Then maybe… maybe we'll find the others here. James. Lily. Sirius." 

He smiles, because she never knew them except Sirius, but she will still help him. She's including herself without thought in that 'we'll' and that makes him smile more than anything else could.

"Yes," he says again, agreeing. "We will."

 **Part Four: Spare Part**

"Molly's going to murder whoever killed him."

"I hope she doesn't. They'd probably come straight here."

"Wormtail didn't."

"Well, yeah…"

There's a burning light behind his eyes so vivid they might not be closed at all, but he's stiff – nearly paralysed – and he can't move an inch except for an irritating, twitching muscle right under his eye.

Are those voices… Sirius? And Hermione?

"Wait. His heartbeat is picking up."

Prof- no, Lupin?

Fred makes a huge effort to wrench his eyes open, and on the third try he gets it, if only barely.

"Fred!"

He's aware there's an intense light source somewhere above, but Lupin's head and shoulders from where he is leaning over Fred manage to block out the worst effects. There's also Tonks, and Sirius like Fred thought, but instead of Hermione, there's… Harry?

Well, it looks like Harry, but older, and with lighter hair and brown eyes instead of green – also, there's no scar, which is the primary thing convincing Fred it's not in fact some weak impostor, but someone else entirely. Also, there's a woman whom Fred doesn't know, with long red hair and an intelligent smile.

"I'm Lily," she says, "Lily Potter," and the bottom falls away from Fred's world.

"You're dead," he says, for once lost for words. "All of you…"

"So are you," Lily says gently, and he squeezes his eyes shut because he's not stupid – he did know it, but it's too horrible to contemplate. On one level, it's ironic, of course – he died laughing at Percy after all – yet on the other hand he knows that just him trying to cover it all up and smooth over the façade that hides the terrible guilt and pain he feels.

"I'm sorry. Sirius and the others tell me you're Fred Weasley?"

"Yeah," he says finally.

James chuckles. "So you're the one who got our map off Filch."

And then it all begins.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxX

As he finds out, time is difficult to judge in the afterlife, but he reckons it's about four or five months later that it happens.

"Where's Wormtail?" he asks.

Lupin debates this for a moment. "He went somewhere else," he says slowly. "He made a different kind of peace with his death."

"So there are only three Marauders left?" Fred asks scratchily, because for friends as close as them he figures it must feel a little like now he's feeling now about George.

They share a glance, and then James shrugs. "If you want there to be."

Fred's confusion must show on his freckled face, because Sirius interjects. "What James is _trying_ to say is that we were wondering if you'd join us."

And then Fred, properly, smiles. It's not much to an outsider, but to him, it's everything.

He can start again, while he waits for George.

"I'd like that," he says, and they all grin slightly. After all, the Marauders are back.

And this time, death won't tear them apart.


End file.
